NodeXL Research Group Meeting: Version 84 emerges with “Schemes”

There has been significant progress in the NodeXL project! We have just released version .84 that includes support for “schemes” that can set a collection of display attributes in a single click. Along with updates to the menu ribbon, NodeXl v.84 is becoming a full featured platform for social network analysis in Excel.

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I attended a meeting at the University of Maryland of the NodeXL research team. Natasa Milic-Frayling from Microsoft Research, Cambridge and Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues (also MSR Cambridge) arranged to visit the campus to meet with Professors Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman from the University of Maryland’s departments of Information Studies and Computer Science respectively. Ben and Derek have had their students Cody Dunne, Dana Rotman, and Elisabeth Bonsignure studying how the students in a recent class used NodeXL. The class focused on studying online communities and social media more broadly. Students studied message boards, social networking services, and game environments, collecting data and analyzing the results with social network techniques.

Results include:

A paper has been written about the way the tool works and was taught and learned — it will be submitted for possible publication at the IEEE Social Computing 2009 conference in Vancouver this August 29/30.

An earlier related paper was accepted for publication at the 2009 Communities and Technologies conference to be held at Penn State University this June 23, 24, 25. The paper describes basic steps for analyzing social media networks.